Capitalism is generating too many isolated men

I could’ve been Tyler Robinson, the 22-year-old Utah man accused of killing right-wing activist Charlie Kirk.

A screenshot of Tyler Robinson, the 22-year-old Utah man accused of killing right-wing activist Charlie Kirk, from his mother’s Facebook account

I could’ve been Tyler Robinson, the 22-year-old Utah man accused of killing right-wing activist Charlie Kirk. I was once a scrawny kid in baggy black T-shirts and Hurley hats. I awkwardly forced a smile in family photos back then (and still sometimes do unless my partner makes me laugh). I played a lot of first-person shooter video games and had inside jokes with gamer friends I’d never met in person. I grew up in a conservative area and learned to shoot guns from my dad.

We don’t know the motive for Kirk’s assassination. But if Robinson is the killer, he surely fits a pattern of isolated, likely overwhelmingly lonely men committing public violence. Neighbors and classmates have called him “shy,” “reserved,” “quiet,” and “keeping to himself.” People said those things about me when I was younger (and still sometimes do). They’ve also said Robinson was “very online,” which could’ve been me too if it weren’t for the sloth-like dial-up internet back then.

I’m just tremendously lucky.

Lucky that I fell in love with pop punk music in high school and had the nerve to start my own band, which got me out of the house and made me a bunch of friends. Lucky that a retired couple in my hometown started a Christian coffee house that hosted all-ages concerts my band could perform at, even though we weren’t Christian. Lucky that my mom had grown up with parents who marched in the civil rights movement in the 1960s, instilling a liberal slant to her politics. Lucky that my dad gravitated toward the populist, neighborly tendencies of his West Virginia roots, not the isolation and hatred. Lucky that friends and ex-partners exposed me to mindfulness meditation, therapy, and other ways of regulating my nervous system, which taught me how to be more open and available for connection with other people.

But I know isolation and loneliness like the back of my hand. I feel it creeping in when I’m done with work for the day. I sense it in strip malls and gas station parking lots and shopping malls and fast-food drive-throughs littered across America. I see it in the faces of many of my therapy clients struggling with overwhelming stress and social anxiety. I’m also lucky that some good-hearted, brilliant friends introduced me to Marxism back during the Occupy movement. Reading Marx’s Capital: Volume 1 taught me that isolation, loneliness, and alienation aren’t how we’re supposed to feel all the time. They’re so widespread these days because of the particular way our society is organized. Because of capitalism.

That’s why the mental health versus guns debate that springs up after public shootings wears on my heart.

It’s obviously both. There are way too many guns in America and way too much isolation, loneliness, and alienation. And both are symptoms of a capitalist society organized to maximize profit for rich people rather than care for people, our communities, and the earth.

I teared up reading writer and organizer

Garrett Bucks

’s call to action to get our hands dirty and build community after the killing:

“Friends, it’s far past time to just name the issue. We just have to do it. We need to facilitate and support spaces (yes for ourselves, but urgently, for young people) where we can all learn what community actually takes in practice.”

I’m worried for young boys. For my 4-year-old nephew playing with his cars in the living room. For my friends’ boys. For all the boys launching headfirst into a world with more and more “manfluencers” pushing outdated version of masculinity, billionaires bending the government toward serving them, and tech lords keeping us addicted to our phones and automating away jobs. But the future is coming for all of us. As

Freddie deBoer

writes:

“The young male, socially and economically unanchored, increasingly broke, ineligible for sympathy, ideologically unformed, represents a point of low inertia in the human political sphere. They are not the cause of the system’s instability, but the most visible symptom of its underlying decay.”

I’m not hopeful right now, because of that underlying decay. Especially as Kirk’s followers double down on his hateful, bigoted politics, the very politics that isolate and turn us against each other. All I have is a little ember of purpose, still burning in the all the darkness. I have to help men, especially young men, find alternatives to the backwards, anti-social version of masculinity the Charlie Kirks and Andrew Tates and Donald Trumps and Elon Musks are peddling. Because I need the help too.

I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments—how are you feeling about the future? What are you doing in your community that’s giving you hope?

— Jeremy